by Jade White
It was an irony to be some mafia boss’s muscle while he still respected humans as much as he could. Sometimes, he was sent to discipline those errant thugs and debtors, and he beat them up as best he could, without killing them. He became known as “The Kid,” Mr. Toretti’s high school and baby-faced employee, who could pack a punch and break a rib or two without batting an eyelash.
Ryker never transformed, but he used what his human side had grown into, and at six feet three inches tall, he was imposing as a kid. His blue eyes were a saving grace. It was known that most werebeings had darker eyes, and he retained his blue ones even as a werebear.
He walked down the streets filled with neon lights and prostitutes, the majority of which were under his boss’s employ.
“Hey there, Ryker,” one heavily made-up prostitute greeted him.
He nodded.
“Off to work again?”
Ryker nodded once more and continued walking with his hands in his pockets. The four women standing by the building looked at him as he walked away.
“It’s too bad he’s off limits,” one said.
“Who said so?”
“He did. But he doesn’t strike me as queer, though,” Yumi said. “I guess you could say he’s dating his job.”
Ryker heard it, but he chose to ignore it. Some made advances, but he didn’t really want to engage in relationships with anyone, romantic or sexual. Work was a good way to release the tensions. If he couldn’t beat anyone up, he feared he would be unable to control his shifting. Control was something that teetered on the edge sometimes, but in all his years of working under Mr. Toretti, he had never once shifted.
He had injuries that healed quicker than most people’s, but he didn’t show these to Mr. Toretti or to his other associates. Sometimes, he feigned prolonged pain from injuries, just to avoid suspicion. Wounds and broken bones were agonizing, but they healed within hours, something that was innate in all werebeings.
The train ride was uneventful, and he was sitting quietly, reading a book by Machiavelli, except he removed the cover and replaced it with something that didn’t scream possible revolt material. Books had been carefully circulated, and what was taught in schools was government approved. Books that imparted even the slightest appeal of out of the box thinking was quickly banned. Even books were contraband now.
His mother had instilled in him a love for reading, and even if he had no teacher, he did his best to learn. Math was out of the question, but what was important was that he was literate. He looked like any normal, if not slightly impoverished, college kid inside the high-speed train, packed with fashionable people. The capital had once been in Washington, but it had been moved to New York after a civil war that had happened a hundred years ago. With the Caledon family taking power, democracy had become a thing of the past, although the privileged ones still liked to say it was a new form of democracy/federalism. Whatever it was, Ryker knew it was a dictatorship embellished with splendor.
President Magnus Caledon’s face wasn’t plastered everywhere, unlike his father’s. His entire family wasn’t as showy, as well, but they made up for their “advertising humility” with their show of force and military prowess. The number of countries across the globe had lessened due to military and economic alliances, and even some of the United States’ territories had seceded to other countries. It didn’t matter much to Ryker. All he wanted was to survive.
Other countries had werebeings as well, but they weren’t vocal about their own oppression. To each his own suffering and victory, like here in America… He saw the screens signaling that this was his stop. Quietly, he got off among the throng of well-dressed men and women. The inner parts of the city were as breathtaking as any other modern metropolis, with its gleaming skyscrapers, levitating railway systems, and amenities that made every other place look undeveloped.
He lived thirty minutes away from the city, in an older town with old and graying buildings, away from the pomp and grandeur, and he preferred that. He could stay almost anonymous, and he was nearer to a patch of forest, one of the few small ones still available. Central Park was a thing of the past and had been replaced with the sprawling White House, a larger replica after it had been decimated during the Great Civil War.
From a few blocks away, he could see the White House loom, a classic design among the sleeker and nearly sterile looking buildings.
Mr. Toretti’s ‘office’ was underneath an old butcher shop; it was a rather large basement with a few detention cells for his pleasure. While the régime was adamant about setting rules and regulations to avoid another uprising, the illegal market still thrived, although it was quite rare. Mr. Toretti was one of those few bold enough to continue contraband.
The butcher’s shop was empty at this hour, and he saw one of Mr. Toretti’s henchmen, a heavyset former wrestler named Grayson, wearing an apron with a bit of blood splattered on it. Ryker nodded at him, and Grayson opened the door that led to the basement. Ryker passed through two flights in a dingy stairwell. At the bottom of the steps was another door. He knocked twice, and then another man, one almost as big as Grayson, opened the door and let him in.
The exposed wooden beams on the ceilings had a few cobwebs, and the smell of pickled meat permeated inside large vats. He knew a few bodies were inside the vats, which was why he avoided food given to him by Toretti’s men, unless it was vegetables and fruits. He walked further down the room, surrounded by ropes of sausages and prime cuts of pork. There was another door, the last one. There was no need to knock, as another henchman quickly opened it as if he had nothing better to do.
Ryker nodded at the henchman again.
“Watcha readin’ there, kid?” Giovanni asked him as he held onto the door knob.
“Something.”
“Contraband, I’m guessing.”
“I live for illegal activity,” Ryker said dryly.
Giovanni guffawed and slapped his shoulder, and Ryker immediately disliked it. He hated physical contact unless it was for business purposes. He forced himself to give a half-hearted grin. Everyone knew him as the awkward, yet scary, kid anyway.
“Get in, boss has been waiting for you for a couple o’ minutes now,” Giovanni said, jerking his thumb forward.
Well, he had only gotten the text an hour ago. Toretti was as demanding as the government, if that was even considered a fair comparison. There were a few rooms inside the basement office, and Toretti’s office was separated behind a bullet-proof, one-way glass partition. He walked inside, looking quite out of place in a mobster’s lair.
“Ah, Ryker. I need you to do something for me,” Mr. Toretti said.
It was always his form of introducing a new assignment. I need you to do something for me seemed polite enough, and Ryker knew Toretti had a few thousand dollars tucked neatly inside an envelope to give to him once he had completed his task.
Toretti explained the assignment with quick hand gestures, to show how displeased he was. Another loan shark hadn’t paid his dues to him, and he wanted what was owed. Ryker nodded. This was going to be easy, as he knew where this loan shark hung out.
“And kid,” Mr. Toretti called out to him before he left, “quiet with the punches, alright?”
“Yes, sir,” Ryker told him.
He was going to be quick about it, and only then could he continue with his book.
CHAPTER THREE
She felt her body seize up as a volt of electric current shot through her body. Her jaw tightened as she tried desperately to keep conscious. Mustn’t faint, mustn’t faint… She felt her teeth grit against each other, and her fists tightened with the shock.
She had been a little girl once, and little girls always had mothers. Little girls always had fathers. Little girls didn’t deserve to be treated this way. Please make it stop, she begged to no one in particular.
What are dreams but subconscious manifestations of what we truly want, a woman’s voice echoed in the darkness. Yes, what did she want? She wanted ma
ny things, but most of all, she wanted her mother. How can you want someone dead? How can you want someone you can’t remember? She was dying, wasn’t she? She could no longer hear that woman’s voice, a woman she likened to be her mother… She tried to concentrate. Somewhere in the deep recesses of her mind, her mother’s face was there, and once she saw it, she would remember it…
She wasn’t dead, someone just took her away… Denial was a safe-haven for suffering. She was in intense pain, and that was why she dreamed…
She slowly opened her eyes, that familiar bruising feeling coursing throughout her body. She was still strapped down to the stainless steel table, and she slowly looked sideways, straining her neck to see if the experiment had made it.
The other table was empty, stripped of its mattress. All that remained was a metallic bed and a few blood splatters on the floor. How many hours had it been since she was knocked out? There was no use trying to remember -- memories were always hazy to her, and whatever happened that day would most likely be wiped out the next.
“How are you feeling?” a brusque voice asked her.
She closed her eyes and licked her lips. Her throat was dry, but still she spoke. “I feel tired.”
“As usual,” the doctor told her, tutting about. “Are creative responses nonexistent nowadays?”
The young woman on the medical table sighed nearly inaudibly. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a wrecking ball a couple of times on every bone in my body.”
The doctor with the afro hair quickly hid her smile. “There you go.”
Even Dr. Delaney felt it was an understatement. It was no easy feat, and her endurance surpassed military men and wrestlers, by all accounts. What was even more amazing was that the test subjects still failed at times when they were experimented together with her.
Dr. Delaney was supposed to say something, but then more of the doctors and scientists came in, each with his and her own tablet.
“Dr. Delaney, we’d like to keep a blood sample for today,” one crisply said.
Edith Delaney’s mouth pursed. “She’s exhausted. We’ll do that some other time.”
“This is per instruction from-“
“In this floor, I am the boss. I want my test subject alive for a breakthrough,” Edith refuted.
“Yes, ma’am,” the others murmured.
“No one,” she began, “I repeat, no one takes anything from her without my express directions.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they said again, unable to look Edith Delaney in the eye.
“What are you all looking at your shoes for?” she snapped at them. “Get a move on!”
Shoes quickly shuffled about, and machines hissed and beeped. In a few moments, someone was ready with a vial of a certain chemical to inject into the test subject.
A man placed his lips close to a microphone, announcing the next phase in the research. “Experiment: Subject A129 will have 3mg of radionuclide dye injected into bloodstream.”
The young doctor was new, and every time he looked at her, subject A129, he felt a pang of sympathy. She was too nice to be stuck here, and they couldn’t even talk to her, lest they be branded as double agents or defectors. She was a tiny thing, pale and thin from lack of exposure to fresh air and sunshine. It was a consolation that she retained some of her beauty, and her haunting gray eyes proved to be quite damaging when he looked at them. There, he saw her fragility and her desperation to stay alive despite the tests.
Subject A129 was still lying on the stainless steel table when she felt something painful pierce her skin, but it was nothing compared to the earlier tests. The dye was cold as it ran through her veins, as always, and she knew what it was for. How many years had it been? She could no longer count, but she knew more about certain tests than the neophyte doctors and scientists knew. There were routines, even if they weren’t constant. There were tests she abhorred and tests she could tolerate mentally. She hated the tests wherein the other person wouldn’t make it. While her heart bled for them, she had developed a certain kind of self-defense against the daily trauma inflicted on her.
She stopped talking to the scientists and doctors unless they spoke to her. Oftentimes, she felt she was no longer treated as human, but Dr. Delaney would remind her she was one through and through. There were only a few people kind to her inside the facility, and Dr. Delaney was one of them. She knew that Dr. Delaney was only forced to act harshly when she was with peers, and she was reminded time and time again of how useful she was to the future of the country.
What she was doing was nothing short of patriotic and heroic, ever since the werebeings had come into light. She was test subject A129 for a reason, and the only one who had survived this long, according to Dr. Delaney, who had been with the program for a little over twenty years now. Subjects like her, they came and went, but it had been more than ten years since she had been brought to the facility. It had been more than ten years since she had seen sunrises and sunsets (those she didn’t even remember), and it had been ten years since she had breathed fresh air, unlike the oxygen circulated in the basement rooms.
She could read and write; Dr. Delaney saw to it that she was educated enough so as she wouldn’t seem feral. Sometimes, Dr. Delaney gave her books -- non-contraband ones, she was assured. She read these again and again. A129 also sketched in her spare time, and most of these sketches were of the people in the facility and haphazard drawings of a world she hadn’t seen in a while. At least they gave her enough paper and pencils to sketch on the days where they had no use for her…
Ten minutes later, after all the data was listed down and submitted, she was moved to a gurney without any straps. She wasn’t going to change, that they knew after years of studying her. She was no werebeing. But there was something about her blood that enhanced certain werebeings and killed others. She had thought that perhaps those who died with her blood in them had DNA weaker than most. It took hours, oftentimes days, to see who died and who lived. Those who survived were damaged for months on end, until one day, their bodies would acclimate, and they would heal faster and better than all the normal humans could, only they had to be in human form.
That she knew, and she kept it to herself. Knowledge was power, and she didn’t want to draw further attention to herself when she was already the center of attention for this study. She recalled that there had been others like her as a child; they had been small like her and deprived of human interaction. There had been no skin-to-skin contact -- the doctors and scientists always had gloves when they touched the children. And one by one, they had died, succumbing to the tests that no children -- not even adult humans -- were even supposed to have. Could she consider herself lucky that she had survived until adolescence? How old was she again?
There were many things she didn’t know about herself, apart from her age. She didn’t know who her family was, although sometimes she had these fragmented dreams of people who had been happy with her once. Who were they? She also didn’t know what she had; she could hear them talking about how she had something special, but she didn’t feel special at all. She was used and abused, with tests ranging from shock therapy to blood transfusions and blood donations to men and women she had never met before.
Sometimes, she even forgot she had a name. Dr. Delaney said her name when they were alone in the rarest of moments. It was a reason to be happy. There was still a part of her the others considered human. She had a name, not just Test Subject A129. She had a real, honest to goodness name, and whenever Dr. Delaney said it, she would feel that warmth spread throughout her body. Was that what happiness was like?
Alexia. Alexia. She enjoyed how her name rolled off her tongue in her many moments of solitude. She read aloud to make up for the silence, imitating accents she heard while inside the laboratories. She heard no music and had no idea what that was like. She only heard the mechanical whirring and hissing of machines, the screaming of the test subjects opposite her, and the humming of a few of the staff who were quickly reprima
nded that it was not the place to break out in tune.
Everyone barely spoke to her, and when they did, it seemed that they were looking far away, not actually focusing on her face, in her eyes. She was nothing more than something dispensable to them, a true test subject. Dr. Delaney, it seemed, tried to keep her spirits up when no one was watching or listening.
She was still on the gurney as they wheeled her out of the room, and the bright lights above her made her squint. She settled for closing her eyes, listening to the creaking of the wheels as they went down a long hallway. She opened them again as soon as she knew they were in front of her quarters. There were a few grunts as they lifted her and then put her on her bed. Home sweet home, she thought.
“Thank you,” she said as the men began to leave her.
One of the men looked back at her, as if wanting to acknowledge her gratitude, but in the end, he just closed the door. Alexia had never tried to escape. She didn’t know her way out of the maze of rooms. At least she knew it was a subterranean facility, from the way it was built.
Her room was rather large, by modern standards, even if it had no windows, and it was painted in white all throughout. On one corner, she had a bookshelf, still sparsely filled. There was a large table in the center of the room where she could eat and draw if she wanted to. And two chairs. Two chairs meant she could have a guest. Sometimes, it was Dr. Delaney who checked up on her, and on the rarest occasions; it was another doctor whom she dreaded the most.
She was now on her bed, with its pristine white sheets that were changed twice a week. Her mattress was thick because she bruised easily, and she knew she would have a hard time getting up later on for her meals and a shower.
There was something about those sterile environments that made her want to clean herself up. But for now, she lay on her bed, staring at the frosted glass door across from her, the door that led to her shower and toilet. She was glad there were no CCTVs inside her room, as Dr. Delaney had insisted that she needed to recuperate far from their prying eyes. ‘She’s already naked in front of us most of the time; why not give her some space?’ Dr. Delaney had said.